Officials are probing how a 51-year-old highway bridge came to collapse in the Italian port city of Genoa yesterday, killing at least 26 people and injuring 16 others as it sent dozens of vehicles tumbling into a heap of concrete and twisted steel.

NSW yoga devotion linked to child abuse

Children living in a NSW yoga centre in the 1970s and '80s were separated from their parents and had a "cult-like dependence" on their leader's partner, a royal commission has found.

The child sexual abuse royal commission on Wednesday delivered its report on the Satyananda Yoga Ashram at Mangrove Mountain, two years after public hearings examined a culture of physical abuse at the ashram.

The commission heard many parents signed over legal guardianship of their children to yoga master Swami Akhandananda and his partner Shishy.

"The devotion to the guru-disciple relationship that was required in the practice of Satyananda yoga at the Mangrove ashram ultimately culminated in a complete and unquestioning trust by both adults and children alike in the erratic and irrational actions and directions of Akhandananda," the report concluded.

"Significant power was vested in Akhandananda and (then ashram global leader) Satyananda, whom members of the Mangrove ashram community considered to be spiritually enlightened."

Shishy, who had begun a relationship with Akhandananda as a teenager, had told the royal commission she, too, had suffered at his hands.

She told the commission Akhandananda had sexually assaulted her with a double-barrelled shotgun, slashed her vagina with nail scissors and used a penknife to dig out moles on her body.